Post-Darwinist

This blog provides stories that Denyse O'Leary, a Toronto-based journalist, has found to be of interest, as she covers the growing intelligent design controversy. It supports her book By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg 2004). Does the universe - and do life forms - show evidence of intelligent design? If so, Carl Sagan was wrong and so is Richard Dawkins. Now what?

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Friday, September 19, 2008

"Evolutionary biologist?" - how about "Historical biologist"?

Over the years, various people who claim to be "evolutionary biologists" (= "novelist who writes about things that happened more than 50 000 years ago.") have been disgruntled that I refer to them as "Darwinists."

They swallow Darwinian theories hook line and sinker, even when those theories are falling apart under the weight of the evidence. So I call them Darwinists or Darwin fans, or whatever.

The old Brit toff Darwin is their patron saint, Lord knows why, and there is no help for that.

But I asked friends whether it wouldn't be better to call them "historical biologists."

A vigorous discussion ensued, and the majority favoured evolutionary historian.

Well, m friends are probably right. A "historical biologist" could be Linnaeus, for example, or Jean-Henri Fabre. An "evolutionary historian" sounds more like Richard Dawkins's Ancestors' Tale. And that , suely, is the correct note.

Female spiders eat their mates because, like, they (drum roll) EVOLVED that way ... or because size matters?

We learn from ScienceDaily (Sep. 11, 2008) that female spiders do not necessarily eat their mates. Now, before we move on, let us pause to think of all the just-so Darwinian sexual selection stories we have heard that explain why they do. (They add to their energy stores, they prevent the male from mating again, they ... )

Researchers Shawn Wilder and Ann Rypstra from Miami University in Ohio found that, in general,

Males are more likely to be eaten if they are much smaller than females, which likely affects how easy they are to catch. In one species of spider, Hogna helluo, large males were never consumed while small males were consumed 80% of the time. This result was also confirmed when Wilder and Rypstra examined published data from a wide range of spider species. Males are more likely to be eaten in species where males are small relative to females.

Much research on sexual cannibalism has focused on a few extreme cases involving sexual selection and sperm competition. However, by looking at data on a wide range of spiders, Wilder and Rypstra discovered that the size of the male relative to the female (often referred to as sexual size dimorphism) determines how often sexual cannibalism occurs in a species.

This sounds like a polite way of saying that previous researchers have focused on the few cases that would confirm Darwin's theory of sexual selection and its theoretical heirs, without looking at fundamental facts like, how does a usually unintelligent creature like a spider know when to attack and consume another life form and when not to. This calculation may well be made irrespective of mating, as Wilder and Rypstra's research suggests.

Does a spider even know that it is having sex? Or that that matters?

They go on to say,

"We were surprised to find that such a simple characteristic such as how small males are relative to females has such a large effect on the frequency of sexual cannibalism," states Shawn Wilder. In many cases, sexual cannibalism may not be a complex balancing act of costs and benefits for males and females but rather a case of a hungry female eating a male when he is small enough to catch.

In an interesting twist, evolution does not appear to be driving this relationship. ...

No surprise there. "Evolution" need not drive the relationship. Once spiders have neural circuits (however, exactly, they acquired them) which determine whether a given life form is too big to attack, they probably don't need "evolution" to drive the subsequent relationship, whether or not it involves reproduction.

Our local spiders pounce on insects that get trapped in their webs but flee humans that accidentally break them. So, in the absence of neuroscience studies on spiders, I will assume that the spider has a system for judging size. In that case, we might predict that neural circuits urging spiders to flee will override those urging them to attack - when the size of the possible object of attack exceeds certain boundaries.

In that case, it would be more useful for researchers to study the spider's nervous system and find the relevant circuit than to speculate on how Darwinian sexual selection might explain why spiders attack or do not attack.